Syracuse football coach: Wind factor lower in MetLife Stadium

The Associated PressHere's a look at MetLife Stadium, formerly the New Meadowlands Stadium, during a New York Jets game.

Syracuse, NY – In four years of coaching with the New York Jets, Doug Marrone came to know well the tricky winds that swirled at the team’s former home field, Giants Stadium.

Marrone, now in his fourth year as head football coach at Syracuse University, said Tuesday that those fabled winds, which used to swirl so bad that the goal post streamers would sometimes blow toward one another from opposite ends of the field, aren’t nearly as bad in MetLife Stadium – the site of Saturday’s game between his Orange and No. 2 USC (3:30 p.m., ABC-TV).

“The only people that were really concerned about the stadium were the kickers and the punters,” Marrone, who served as the Jets' offensive line coach from 2002-05, said during a conference call. “Obviously the old stadium … anyone who is a fan knows the conditions, how they could get, as far as the wind.”

Marrone said the outside walls of the new structure, which opened in April 2010 and replaced the longtime home of both the NFL’s New York Giants and Jets in East Rutherford, N.J., are higher than the old ones, thus reducing the effects of the wind.

“I guess I am giving an advantage now, to the opposing team,” Marrone said, “but (the streamers on) both poles, field goal posts, whichever way they’re blowing is a pretty good indication of which way the wind is blowing. That wasn’t necessarily the case in the old stadium.”

Still, the wind does swirl inside the new structure, which opened as the New Meadowlands but now is known as MetLife Stadium.